Saturday, January 11, 2014

When You Make Your Move

With a letter as filled with the basic disruptions of life
as those Lummie Davis Moore was experiencing, sometimes you have to read
between the lines to pick up further clues about the extended family.

In this brief letter I found among family papers, Lummie was
writing to her brother Jack, following her unexpected fall after attending a
bridge luncheon at a hotel near her home in Phoenix, Arizona.
The two letters I’ve discovered so far indicate that fall occurred sometime
around May of 1962. At that point, Lummie was nearing seventy six years of age.
In contrast, her “baby brother” Jack was a mere sixty four.

Apparently, Jack and his wife, Ruth Broyles McClellan Davis,
had managed to claim for themselves an early retirement. After each of their
two daughters had come of age just after the war in the mid 1940s, Jack and
Ruth had set to work to meet that financial goal.

At the time, the Davis family
was living in Columbus, Ohio,
where they had settled after leaving Denver,
Colorado, sometime before the 1940 census. Twenty years of hard work brought the couple to the point where
they felt they could claim their dream as a reality, and they packed up and
moved to their personal paradise in Roanoke,
Virginia.

I’m not sure why Jack and Ruth Davis chose Roanoke as their retirement haven,
but I have some guesses. First, Virginia
offered a bit more southern flavor than Ohio
for these deep-South emigrants; it wasn’t exactly Florida,
and it wasn’t Tennessee,
but it most certainly was Southern.

Then, too, the city’s situation in a river valley close to
the Blue Ridge Mountains would qualify it as
scenic enough to satisfy Ruth’s penchant for taking long leisurely drives in
the mountains.

For their grandchildren, however, the city of Roanoke created a few
small problems. From my northern distance in far, far away New York, I, for one, was too young to
figure out how to pronounce the city’s name, which provoked a universe of grief
when it came time to perform on those obligatory thank you notes after
Christmas and birthdays (and oh, how greatly this letter-writer would have preferred it if the city fathers had rather chosen to remain with the place's original name, Big Lick). I was eternally grateful that the Davises
soon saw fit to return to Columbus—a name any grade school student was able to spell handily (well, at least until
that era when Christopher Columbus’ monumental attainment became viewed as a
politically incorrect blunder).

Discussions of their pending decision to move back to Columbus must have
transpired between Jack and his older sister Lummie. Mentions of real estate
transactions called to mind not only his former work experience as a real
estate salesman, but his hope to invest wisely, should he purchase any land on
his move back to Columbus.

I have no idea how long Jack and Ruth lingered over the possibility
of retracing their steps and returning to Columbus,
but Lummie’s letter provided a target time for the move by mentioning it in
closing her letter to them from her convalescent hospital.

Sometimes, it’s the incidentals packed into the
parenthetical phrases of mundane letters that provide the timelines—and the
connections—we need to piece together our family history narratives.

I sit up now most of
the day in fact all morning, can go all over [the] place in my wheel chair. At
one p.m. I have sun bath, for 30” then good nap—am just coming along fine—but
time goes slowly. Don’t worry about me have everything I need—Good food,
wonderful attention. It’s just a matter of waiting—

"Rural enough AND city enough"--sounds like where I am now, but I'm not sure I'd opt to retire here, either. I never did know why the choice was made for Roanoke. Maybe there was a retirement village there that they liked. Who knows. All I remember was the change in address to the new place--and then back again. Never saw the place. Not even pictures...

Having been to Roanoke several times, I don't know why it would have any particular allure. It is a transportation hub... lots of railroads eent through town.. maybe it was a place they stopped over at and had a fond memory thst drew them?

It's quite a thought to think Lummie had missed her brother. After all, this is the woman who chose to travel far from home, and ended up living and working in a foreign country.

Of course, perhaps their relationship as adults was molded through Jack's time working with Lummie's husband in Honduras.

Then, again, who knows how many letters passed between the two families over the years. I'm amazed that these two letters--among the rare few--survived the watchful eye of two different housecleaning vigilantes between 1962 and 2013.

About Me

It is my contention that, after a lifetime, one of the greatest needs people have is to be remembered. They want to know: have I made a difference?
I write because I can't keep for myself the gifts others have entrusted to me. Through what I've already been given--though not forgetting those to whom I must pass this along--from family I receive my heritage; through family I leave a legacy. With family I weave a tapestry. These are my strands.